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Willie Knickerbocker has a lot to teach us about getting there

By Steve McQuiddy

For The Register-Guard

Appeared in print: Sunday, Sept. 1, 2013, page G1

The recent dedication of the Whilamut Passage Bridge certainly has been cause for celebration. It seems no stone was left unturned in considering the physical, cultural, historical and aesthetic elements involved in the new Interstate 5 bridge over the Willamette River.

Except one.

If you go down the bicycle path off Franklin Boulevard to the Knickerbocker Bridge, where the rush of the cars and trucks high above almost gives way to the ripple and splash of the water, you can view the elegant arches and see the beginnings of the improvements to the bike paths and river banks. But you can barely see the Willie Knickerbocker marker.

Willie Knickerbocker? Who’s he?

“The father of bicycling in Eugene,” Register-Guard columnist Dan Sellard wrote in 1978. “That’s who.”

Willie was born in 1868 at the family homestead near Deadmond Ferry on the McKenzie River, near where PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center’s RiverBend campus stands today. He was short and wiry, with legs like steel bands.

Willie got his first bicycle in the 1890s, a “direct drive” model — just two sprockets and a chain with no brakes. He’d stop by using sheer leg power on the pedals.

He wasn’t too bright, people said, kind of simple-minded. But he sure could ride. He’d put on his baseball cap and rubber boots and ride 100 miles to Portland, 50 to the coast, another 100 and more over the Cascade mountains, or up the Columbia River to The Dalles before Celilo Falls disappeared.

One story had Willie riding to Mexico and back, all the way on dirt and gravel.

Willie didn’t talk much, but he loved attention when he got on his bike. He would ride out to the grade schools and do tricks for the kids — especially his famous “high kick,” where he leaned forward on the handlebars and put one foot on the seat and kicked the other leg high in the air.

He’d do this all day long if people would watch.

Willie also wrote one-line letters to the editor, delivering them personally to The Register-Guard office. He would walk in the door and silently hold out a grubby piece of paper until someone came by and took it from his hand. Each letter was just one or two lines, short bits of verse, what some might call folk wisdom:

“I saw a rooster in the rain, eating gravel to grind his grain.”

“If a man had to milk a dog, he’d say a cow was his best friend.”

And he summed up 50 years of civilization thusly: “I saw Oregon go from geese to gas.”

In the 1950s, he became a fixture in the Eugene Pet Parade, where children would march in the streets with their dogs and cats and canaries and chameleons, maybe a calf or a goat.

Willie loved leading the parade. He’d shine his bike and decorate it with raccoon tails and crepe paper, then he’d roll up his pants legs and do his tricks for the crowd — handlebar handstands, the high kick, and sometimes a wheelie or two.

And Willie kept at it until he was almost 90 years old.

When he died in 1960 at age 92, his obituary and photo were front-page news. People remembered the stories: the direct-drive bicycle, the steel-band legs, the high kick, and a tale that he’d once challenged a horse to a race, although no one could remember who’d won.

Willie had gotten by on welfare checks, and a search of the single building that remained of the Knickerbocker homestead showed his assets totaled about $200.

“But poor though he was in material possessions,” Dan Sellard wrote, “Willie was rich in fans and friends.”

When the 1970s brought the Willamette Greenway program and attendant bicycle trails, the Eugene Water & Electric Board joined in by approving a plan to build bike bridges over its conduits that forded the river.

When the utility built a bridge in 1978, Sellard started a campaign to name the new bridge after Willie, by then gone almost 20 years.

Name it the Willie Knickerbocker Bicycle Bridge, Sellard wrote. “How he would love that.”

Three months later, the EWEB board approved the name unanimously.

Today, we have a new double-span bridge high above the Willamette River. We also have a smaller bridge, still solid but a little rough around the edges where the old wooden railings are dried and splintering.

The bronze plaque on the concrete pillar is still there, but it’s showing its age. Let’s not forget the simple man who lived a simple life, riding his bicycle as the world sped up around him.

The man who, when asked why he rode — if it was the independence or the beauty or the solitude — cocked his head and scrunched his eyes and thought about it a moment and said, “No, it’s to get there.”